Hap over at A Fundamental Shift has been talking about fundamental shifts for a while now, and now she’s shifted so fundamentally that she’s fundamentally shifted clean out of A Fundamental Shift. To wit, her blog is now titled . . . the most curious thing . . . and looks curiously different. Fundamentally, however, it’s still shifty, and it’s still Hap. If you haven’t checked it out, you should.
Author Archives: Rob Harrison
On heterodoxy and salvation
Dr. Richard Mouw, the president of Fuller Seminary, put up a post on his blog a few days ago reflecting on another Dutch Presbyterian, the great theologian Cornelius Van Til (who was, among other things, the founder of the presuppositional school of Christian apologetics). In it, he describes a conversation he had with Dr. Van Til, a discussion of Karl Barth, which had a formative influence on his approach to Christians with whom he disagrees:
Van Til’s remark left a lasting impression on me. He was firm in his verdict that Barth was far removed from historic Christian teaching, yet he was still unwilling to offer a similarly critical assessment of the state of Barth’s soul. Ever since, I have tried to exercise a similar caution. It is one thing to evaluate a person’s theology. It is another thing to decide whether that person has a genuine faith in Christ.There are folks these days who worry about what they see as an overly charitable spirit in people like me. They think it is dangerous to enter into friendly dialogue with thinkers whose theological views are far removed from traditional Christian orthodoxy. They tend to think that if a person is unorthodox they cannot be in a saving relationship with Christ. I take a different view on those matters.
I appreciate this post because I share Dr. Mouw’s caution (and Dr. Van Til’s)—or perhaps I might better say, humility—in this respect; I think we tend to be far too quick to pronounce wrong doctrines salvation-impairing. I do believe there is a point at which people are so far from the truth that they are in fact worshiping a different God (Hinduism, for instance, is obviously a completely different thing than Christianity), but I suspect that that point isn’t exactly where we think it is, and that the line between saving faith and beliefs which do not lead to salvation is perhaps somewhat fuzzier than we assume.HT: Presbyweb
Coram Deo
(Exodus 33, Psalm 27, Ephesians 1:15-23)
Exodus 33 begins immediately after the first great national sin in the history of the people of Israel, which is recorded in chapter 32. Moses had been up on Mount Sinai, meeting with God, receiving the Law; unfortunately, he was up there so long that the Israelites got restless. Restless people tend to do stupid things, and they were no exception; they talked Moses’ brother Aaron into making them an idol, a golden statue of a cow, that they could worship and pretend it was the Lord. That might seem odd, but golden cows are safe, and this God of theirs had already proven himself anything but. Their action, of course, infuriated God, who judged them harshly for their sin. (Aaron, who had allowed the whole thing, escaped judgment despite offering perhaps the dumbest excuse in recorded history; when Moses took him to task for his actions, Aaron’s response was twofold: one, “Don’t blame me, blame them, they’re wicked people,” which is bad enough, but then two, “They gave me the gold, I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!” Honest, that’s a direct quote from Exodus 32:24. “I didn’t make the calf, it just happened!” Reminds me of some of the excuses I’ve gotten from my children.)
After this, God told Moses to tell his people, “Go on up to the land I promised Abraham I would give you, and I’ll send my angel before you, but I won’t go with you, or I would destroy you on the way; for you are a stiff-necked people.” At that, the people went into mourning, and Moses began to plead with God to reverse this decision, for the sake of his people, and for Moses’ sake. Notice the reason for their concern. It’s not that God won’t bless them—he’s still promising to give them the land, and victory over the people who currently live there, and all the good things he’d already said he’d give them; it’s that he’s refusing to go with them. He’s keeping his presence from them, promising only to send an angel with them to do all this rather than going with them to do it himself.
The NIV calls this statement “these distressing words,” but the English Standard Version is blunter: they’re “disastrous.” God’s blessings are nice, but having his presence with them means far more; that’s what sets them apart from the other nations as his people. Without that, without God going with them, they were no different from anyone else, either to themselves or to any other nation. Thus when God says in verse 14, “Don’t worry, Moses, I’ll still be with you and give you rest,” Moses responds, “That’s not good enough. Either go with all of your people, or don’t bother.” Nothing else will do—not for Moses and not for Israel, and ultimately, not for God, either. After all, what would it do for God’s reputation to lead his people out of Egypt and then leave them in the desert? In response, God says, “All right, Moses—for your sake, I’ll do as you ask.”
At this point, Moses does something extraordinary. You can understand why he does it—he’s probably giddy with relief, for one thing; but more than that, God had just made him a promise, and he wants confirmation, and so he asks, “Show me your glory.” This might not sound like a big request, until we remember that Moses had been spending considerable time with God on the mountain—he was up there for eleven chapters of Exodus before the Israelites decided they’d rather worship a golden cow; he’d seen quite a bit of God, in fact, and now he’s clearly asking for something more. He’s talked with God, he’s seen demonstrations of God’s power and glory; now he wants to see God.
And God says, “I can’t do that, because you wouldn’t survive it. No human being can see my face and live.” God is infinite, and we’re finite; he’s perfectly holy, and we’re sinful. The gap between us is great, and the attempt to cross it, to experience the full reality of the infinite God, is simply more than we can bear. And so God tells Moses, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you my name, Yahweh; I will put you in a crack in the rock and cover you with my hand while my glory passes by, then I will remove my hand, and you may see my back; but my face you shall not see.” Now, I don’t know what this looked like to Moses; I’m not sure what exactly God meant by his “back”; but what’s clear is that God told Moses, “I won’t show you my face, but I’ll show you who I am; I’ll reveal my character and my goodness to you.”
That would have to be enough for Moses, and for everyone else; but the desire for more, the desire to see God face to face, persisted. We see this in Psalm 27, which is a psalm of David—which is valuable to know with this psalm, because David, like Moses, was one of God’s special servants, someone who got as close to God as it was possible to get. The Lord truly was his light and salvation, his refuge and stronghold; he’d had armies encamped against him more than once, and evil men working overtime to kill him, and he’d learned that as long as he was on God’s side, he had nothing to worry about. He was unquestionably a man who could write a psalm like this and mean every word.
Out of David’s great confidence in God comes great loyalty and devotion, which we see in this extraordinary statement in verse 4: “One thing I have asked of the LORD, this one thing will I seek: to live in the house of the LORD all the days of my life.” Psalm 84 makes a somewhat similar statement—“How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD Almighty! . . . Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere”—but this takes things to a whole new level. It’s not that this is the only thing David wants—this psalm is, after all, a prayer for victory over his enemies—but this is his one thing: it’s his focus, his primary concern, his primary desire. It’s what he wants to order his life and make sense of everything else; his prayer is that he would live his life as much in the presence of God as if he were always in the temple offering worship and sacrifice to God.
Now, trying to keep that focus is hard, and it was hard for David, too; but at the core, his great desire is to experience the presence of God. There are two reasons for this. The second one mentioned is “to inquire in his temple,” which is to say, to seek guidance from God for his decisions; he wants to live in God’s presence in order to come to know and do what God would have him to do. He understands that we can’t make godly decisions with any sort of regularity if the only time we spend with God is an hour a week on Sunday mornings. But as important as this second reason is, the first is more striking: “to behold the beauty of the LORD.” This is starting to get into the same territory as Moses—it isn’t quite the same, but David’s moving that way: he wants to see God.
That comes out in full force in verses 8 and 9: “‘Come,’ my heart says, ‘seek his face!’ Your face, O LORD, do I seek. Do not hide your face from me.” It’s a prayer that can’t be fully answered, but still, the longing is there. And it should be—it means a lot to be face to face with those we love. I discovered just how much during my last semester in college, when Sara went off to Scotland, to Aberdeen. (In that case, not only could I not see her, I couldn’t even hear her voice, since I couldn’t afford international long distance rates.) I learned then that there’s a degree of real intimacy and knowledge in talking with someone we love face to face, in the openness of their facial expressions and body language and the immediacy of reaction; we can know someone more fully face to face than at a distance. David wanted to know God in that way.
These texts are the backdrop against which Jesus tells his disciples, “If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” Philip was probably studying to be a rabbi, so he knew all this stuff; but when Jesus said that, he couldn’t help himself, and he burst out, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” He knows they can’t—he knows how God answered Moses, and no doubt he expects much the same response— and so maybe we may hear in Philip’s plea an edge of disappointment, that ultimately Jesus can’t quite give them what he’s promising.
Jesus responds with gentle exasperation: “Philip, haven’t you been paying attention all these years? Have you been with me this long, and you still don’t know who I am?” And then this staggering, world-shaking statement: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” No one could see God and live; we could not leap across that chasm and even hope to survive the jump; so God crossed it from his side. The glory, grace and truth of God were too much for our eyes, until the coming of Jesus; when he came to earth, God took on a human face and allowed his people to look him in the eyes; and through those eyes, and through his words, and through his actions, his glory, grace and truth shone unveiled and undimmed. As John put this point earlier in his gospel, at the end of his prologue, in 1:18, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” We cannot see God and live—unless God makes it possible; and in Jesus, he has, and we have.
This is why we can pray as we do. We don’t have to approach God behind a veil of smoke, because Jesus made a way for us. We see God’s face in him and do not die because he took that death, and every other death, on himself; he came down to us, and through his death, resurrection and ascension he became the way to God. We in our sinfulness still could never survive the sort of revelation Moses wanted, but in the words and deeds of Jesus recorded in the gospels, and through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, we can see God in ways that he never could; in worship, in study and in prayer, God invites us into his presence to seek his face, as David longed to do.
That’s why the church could adopt the motto Coram Deo, which means, “in the presence of God”—because that’s where we as the church are supposed to live. That’s the key to kingdom-centered prayer. It’s not the subject—I hope I didn’t give anyone the idea last week that praying for our needs or the needs of others can’t be kingdom-centered, because it can, if our overall approach to prayer is focused on God and centered on the work of his kingdom. That approach and that focus are the key, that though we pray for ourselves and others, our prayer is fundamentally about God and concerned with his will. The foundational prayer is that of Moses and David: God, let me see your face, let me live each day in your presence, consciously aware of your presence. It’s not about trying to make God do what we want, but about letting go of such efforts—letting God be God and ourselves just be his children—and seeking to know him as he is. This isn’t something that just happens; seeking means looking hard and earnestly, and it takes intention, concentration, and thought. It takes real effort and commitment, not because God’s trying to hide from us, but rather because there’s a part of us that’s always trying to hide from God; to seek God’s face, we need to fight that down and consciously bend ourselves to his will. So let’s concentrate on seeking God’s face this morning, the face of Jesus our Lord, in the presence of his Holy Spirit, in song, in the confession of our faith, and in prayer.
Considering the president’s legacy
At this point, it’s a virtual certainty that George W. Bush will leave the presidency with a very low public approval rating. Though I’m sure that hurts, I believe he’s wise enough not to take that too seriously. The president who would govern well does so not for the opinion polls but for history (which is why the Founders hoped for citizen politicians rather than the professional political class we ended up with), and sometimes that leads to the choice between the popular course and the best course. Say what you will about the President, he’s never hesitated to be unpopular if he thinks it’s the right thing to do (though he’s often hesitated to defend himself effectively for doing so); in that respect, he’s a lot like another man who left the office wildly unpopular—Harry S Truman. Like President Truman, though not to the same extent, I believe President G. W. Bush will fare much better in the judgment of history than in the judgment of journalism.One reason for this is that Iraq is turning out well. As I noted a while ago, it’s the only real bright spot in this administration’s foreign policy, and even this only comes after several badly-handled years—one of the ironies of the Bush 43 administration is that it owes this victory in large part to John McCain—but when it’s all said and done, unless Barack Obama wins and manages to throw it all away, the last several years will have seen Iraq transformed from a nation suffering to enrich a bloody, terrorist-funding tyrant to a stable democracy and a potentially invaluable ally in the Middle East. That’s an ally we’ll need badly when the inevitable collapse of the Saudi ruling family finally comes. Unless you have an a priori commitment to pacifism—a commitment I respect, when it’s truly principled, but do not share—that’s clearly a good thing.I suspect, though, that history’s judgment of President G. W. Bush will rest equally heavily on two things not much considered now: the two great domestic political failures of his administration. The first is the attempt to reform Social Security—this, not the Iraq War, was the political disaster that wrecked so much of his second term. Our struggles in Iraq certainly didn’t help, but they only carried the force they did because the President had spent so much of his political capital on this issue. Put me down as one who thinks Social Security is doomed, and that this administration’s initiative, politically stupid as it was, was nevertheless noble (in a Quixotic sort of way) and very important. Twenty or thirty years from now, I suspect the narrative on this one will be “man of foresight brought down by the forces of reaction.”The second is the failure to pass a comprehensive energy policy. As Investor’s Business Daily notes,
When the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007, and oil was $50 a barrel and corn $2 a bushel, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised an energy plan. We’re still waiting for it. Today, crude oil is $134 and corn is $6.50.It’s pretty clear who’s to blame: Congress. In fact, House and Senate Democrats have obstructed any progress in America’s fight to regain some semblance of energy independence.
But that’s been the pattern. This administration started trying seven years ago to implement the kind of energy plan the Reid-Pelosi leadership said they would deliver; it didn’t happen, in large part, because of Rep. Pelosi and Sen. Reid. If it had, we wouldn’t be looking at $4-a-gallon gasoline, and our economy would be in much better shape; we’d also have critically important work underway to modernize and revamp our national electrical grid, and programs in place alongside them to shift our electrical production away from fossil fuels and toward other energy sources. The Democrats in Congress killed it, and so we are where we are today. Again, I suspect the future will blame the President much less than does the present.As a side note on energy: nuclear power plants have worked well for decades in Western Europe without any significant problems, while ongoing improvements in drilling technology mean we can open up massive new oil reserves—in ANWR, the continental shelf, the Green River Basin, and the Bakken Formation—with minimal consequences. I agree that both these things need to be approached with strong concern for environmental preservation—but they can be. I believe we need to set aside the hysteria and the absolutist positions and try to come up with workable compromises.HT (for the IBD editorial): Carlos Echevarria
Further thought on Sarah Palin
Chris Cilizza, in the Washington Post, broke down John McCain’s VP options this way:
McCain’s choice is whether to throw a “short pass” or a “Hail Mary.”The short pass candidates are people that McCain is personally close to or would fit an obvious need for him. Choosing a “short pass” candidate would be a signal that McCain believes he can win this race without fundamentally altering its current dynamic. Among the “short pass” names are: Govs. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Charlie Crist of Florida, former governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, former Rep. Rob Portman of Ohio and South Dakota Sen. John Thune. The “Hail Mary” option would suggest that McCain believes that he has to shake up the race with an entirely unexpected and unorthodox choice that would carry great reward and great risk. It’s the opposite of a safe pick. Among that group: Govs. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Sarah Palin of Alaska.
He then proceeded, for the first time, to list Gov. Palin as one of the top five possibilities as Sen. McCain’s running mate.Here’s my question: where’s the risk? I agree that either Gov. Jindal or Gov. Palin would offer potentially much greater reward than anyone on Cilizza’s “short pass” list; honestly, if you want to find someone you can put in that category who would offer Sen. McCain any significant benefit at all, I think you have to go to SEC Chairman and former California Representative Chris Cox. What I don’t see is what makes either of these governors (and though I clearly prefer Gov. Palin, I do think Gov. Jindal is one of the party’s bright hopes going forward as well) significantly riskier than anyone on that first list, let alone all of them. For my money, the riskiest choice Sen. McCain could make for VP is Mitt Romney—and I say that as someone who previously hoped to see Gov. Romney win the nomination. I think Gov. Romney has an excellent record of accomplishment in the Massachusetts state house and as a businessman, I think he would add enormous financial and administrative acumen to the ticket—and based on his primary performance, I think the Democratic attack machine would slice him to ribbons and make him a drag on the ticket anyway. Gov. Romney would give them a figure they could attack in ways in which they can’t go after Sen. McCain, and those attacks would hurt his campaign badly. Not providing an easy surrogate target should be one of the chief qualifications for McCain’s running mate; on that score, I can’t think of anyone who fills the bill as well as Gov. Palin who also offers as many plusses as she does (plusses which I’ve laid out here, and Carlos Echevarria has listed here).I don’t think Gov. Palin’s a “Hail Mary” (which is a good thing, since I’m pretty sure she’s not Catholic); she’s more in the nature of a perfectly-timed draw play, or perhaps a Patriots go route, Tom Brady to Randy Moss. Something good’s going to happen if that play gets called, and it could be all the way to paydirt.
Ministry in emerging adulthood
I’ve been mulling over these links for a while, and I haven’t really come to a clear sense of what I want to say about them; but somewhere in there, I think, are some important things about what it means to be a young pastor in a time when more and more people in their twenties and early thirties are finding the transition into adulthood long, disorganized and uncertain (such that sociologists are now labeling this stage of life “emerging adulthood”). The pastor of a church is, essentially, the Adult in Chief; that’s a hard role to fill if you haven’t yet come to see yourself as fully an adult and the peer of all those grizzled, experienced, opinionated, strong-willed folks who most likely make up the lay leadership of the church you serve. That’s a problem, because if you don’t see yourself as their peer and equal, they won’t either . . . and if they don’t, you’re toast.Emerging AdulthoodEmerging Adulthood IIThe Father Pfleger ShowSFTS Experience
Thought on Sarah Palin
We know Sarah Palin is interested in being John McCain’s running mate; we know that enthusiasm for that prospect is growing, to the point that even skeptics are taking notice. Gov. Palin’s most eager supporters are urging Sen. McCain to name her his running mate soon, for maximum benefit. I can think of at least two reasons why he hasn’t, however, even if he is in fact leaning that way (as I hope he is).The first is no doubt the charges recently raised by Andrew Halcro that Gov. Palin has abused her office in some unusually inappropriate ways. Given that Halcro is one of the politicians Gov. Palin beat two years ago in winning the governorship, the charges have rather the appearance of sour grapes, but until such time as they’re refuted (as I would hope and tend to expect they will be), obviously, Sen. McCain won’t put her on the ticket. Should she come through these charges unharmed, I would think that would only strengthen her chances.The second, which is more speculative, comes from my father-in-law, a lifelong Michigander who’s been touting Gov. Palin for VP since back when I was still hoping for Condoleeza Rice. He notes that one of the governor’s major accomplishments was the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, and suggests that she probably doesn’t want to leave Juneau until the pipeline contract is done. If that is in fact an issue, I’d be interested to see Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin play it this way. Let Sen. McCain name Gov. Palin his running mate, and let the governor announce that she has a few matters to finish up before she can go on the road. Then go back to Juneau and tell the legislature that if they want to help the Republican candidate win the White House, they’d better get the lead out. I suspect that at that point, they’d be very willing to finish up whatever she wanted done.(Update: now that I’ve finally had the chance to see Adam Brickley’s video responses to Halcro’s charges—plus the additional thoughts in the third comment on that thread, from Dave ll—and to read the documents in the case [see the yellow sidebar on KTVA’s website], it seems clear to me that Gov. Palin’s actions were in no wise inappropriate. There are definite suggestions in other articles KTVA has posted that the governor’s office was at least applying some pressure on Walt Monegan, the former Alaska Public Safety Commissioner, to fire State Trooper Mike Wooten, her sister’s ex-husband; on the evidence, however, a) that pressure seems entirely justified, and b) Monegan’s refusal does not seem to have been the reason for his firing. Instead, this episode seems rather like an attempted political hit on Gov. Palin by a disgruntled political opponent, Andrew Halcro, and the state troopers’ union, which was unhappy at her efforts to streamline the budget and cut waste. Taken all in all, if this reading of the situation bears out, this should only make her a more appealing running mate for Sen. McCain, not less.)
Can Barack Obama find a place to stand?
The Democratic primaries this year reminded me a little of a football game. In football, for a fast running back, one good way to break a long run (if no one’s looking for it) is to outrun everyone to the sideline, then outrun them down the field. That’s more or less what Sen. Obama did: he outran the field to the left sideline, then outran everyone clear to the endzone. On this read, I guess John Edwards was the blitzing linebacker who gets taken clean out of the play by the fullback, while Hillary Clinton was the safety in deep coverage who initially misreads the play and can’t quite get back into it—she laid a hand on Gayle Sayers Obama (need to keep the Chicago tie; I suppose you could also call him Devin Hester Obama) as he streaked by, but that was about it.Now, this sort of thing is a great way to produce exciting results, get the crowd stirred up and on their feet; but unlike for the Chicago Bears, for the Chicago senator, it has some negative consequences: namely, it ties him pretty closely to the voting record that earned him the label of the most liberal politician in Congress. In the primaries, this was a good thing, because most of those who vote in Democratic primaries are liberals; what’s more, this drove an incredible Internet fundraising machine which raked in unprecedented amounts for Sen. Obama from the liberal Democratic netroots. In the general election, however, this isn’t a good thing, because America’s a pretty centrist place; even if Sen. Obama’s the most exciting politician this country has seen in a long time, and even if the chance to elect a dark-skinned President is extremely alluring (even though he isn’t the descendant of slaves), in the end, the most liberal politician in Congress is going to be too far away from most voters to win in November.So, naturally, having won the primaries by running left as fast as he could, Sen. Obama has now attempted to cut back in toward the middle of the field, rather than just taking the ball down the sideline. The problem is, that isn’t always easy to do, and the early returns might suggest that it isn’t working all that well. I noted a few days ago the drop in Sen. Obama’s poll numbers, offering my own conclusion that the main lesson from them is that we don’t know as much as we think we do; for what it’s worth, though, Dick Morris and Ed Morissey, a pair of savvy political operators, have drawn the conclusion that Sen. Obama’s “series of policy reversals and gaffes” were the primary cause. Morris even went so far as to declare that “Obama has carried flip-flopping to new heights.” I think that’s hyperbole, but Morris does have an important point: “As a candidate who was nominated to be a different kind of politician, Obama has set the bar pretty high. And, with his flipping and flopping, he is falling short, to the disillusionment of his more naïve supporters.” This is particularly important given the thinness of Sen. Obama’s record; we really don’t know much about him as a leader, and he doesn’t have much to point us to beyond what he tells us during the campaign. If his actions tell us that his political convictions are at the service of political expediency—which seems to be what a lot of the netroots folks who’ve driven his fundraising are concluding—then that could really hurt him in the long run, especially against a candidate like John McCain who’s broadly respected for his political integrity (and especially if Sen. McCain chooses a running mate like Sarah Palin who will further point up that contrast).Sen. Obama is a formidably gifted politician who’s shown some remarkable instincts, even as he’s also made a lot of high-profile gaffes; he’s still the favorite in November, though I still think it will be close and I’m personally still betting on the underdog. If he can’t find a way to credibly move to the center without looking like just another politician, though, he could lose that favorite status in a hurry. Archimedes is credited with saying, “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world.” Sen. Obama has the lever; can he find the place to stand?
A politician of principle
Eight years ago, I told any number of people that my main problem with the presidential race is that the wrong people were on top of the tickets—I’d rather have voted for either Joe Lieberman or Dick Cheney than either George W. Bush or Al Gore. I’ve admired Sen. Lieberman ever since William F. Buckley formed BuckPac to help him beat Republican incumbent Lowell Weicker in Connecticut, and the subsequent years have proven that admiration well-founded. From everything I’ve seen, Lieberman’s an honorable and principled politician, a man of integrity who’s kept his integrity basically intact, which is hard to do in D.C.; it’s a pity he’s not an exciting political figure, because he’s the sort of person who would serve us well as president.Unfortunately, that integrity, combined with his stubborn loyalty, means he’s now in hot water with the Democratic Party leadership (though he had to run as an independent two years ago to keep his Senate seat, he’s still functionally a Democrat). I can certainly understand where the Democratic leadership is coming from; it’s hard to blame them when Sen. Lieberman is openly campaigning for the Republican nominee, and equally openly critical of their own nominee. At the same time, though, I respect Sen. Lieberman for having the courage of his convictions; and at a time when the Republicans have nominated a man who has angered many in his own party for putting his convictions ahead of party loyalty and party discipline, it would be a sad commentary for the Democrats to disfellowship one of their own for doing the same thing.
Barack Obama, 9/19/01
Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy. Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction.We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe—children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.(From the Hyde Park Herald, September 19, 2001; quoted in “Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama,” in The New Yorker.)
I agree that we need to “understand the sources of such madness”—but to do that, we need to understand them on their own terms, not to try to reduce them to contemporary Western touchy-feely-ism. The problem with the 9/11 terrorists wasn’t psychological. I certainly agree that they showed “a fundamental absence of empathy,” but that was the symptom, not the condition—it was the effect, not the cause. Specifically, the absence of empathy and the plot to destroy the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and (I believe) the U. S. Capitol were both effects of a common cause: the murderous ideology of jihadism, the Islamic heresy propounded by Osama bin Laden. The problem isn’t “a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair”; that’s certainly a problem for its own sake and something to be addressed as best as we’re able, but it’s not the root cause here. The 9/11 terrorists, after all, hadn’t come from “poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair”—they were middle-class and well-educated. The problem is a worldview that says that blowing people up because they aren’t Muslims (and the right kind of Muslims, at that) is a good and noble thing to do. There, Sen. Obama, is the source of the madness—there and nowhere else.HT: Carlos Echevarria